Nina Hendy, Sydney Morning Herald, July 15, 2011
BOOK publishers are facing upheaval as new technology threatens to derail the publishing industry but the sector is fighting back by using social media as a key marketing tool.
Random House Australia is the latest publisher to achieve strong book sales results on the back of a social-media campaign. The publisher has used Facebook and YouTube to connect with readers, which has propelled the third book in US author Lauren Kate's Fallen series to No. 1 on the Nielsen BookScan bestseller list each week since its June 14 launch.Random House Australia has used social-media channels for the past couple of years, fine-tuning its approach along the way. The results are impressive given that the rise of technology, including e-books, is proving a big challenge for publishers.
One of the best recent examples of social media fuelling sales has come out of the US. A children's book designed to appeal to adults called Go the F--- to Sleep reached No. 1 on Amazon's bestseller list seven months before publication after a PDF version of the book went viral.
Sales and marketing manager at Random House Australia, Justin Ractliffe, said the Fallen series had sold 2.6 million English-language copies globally and Australian sales were above 354,000. ''We're punching way above our weight on this brand,'' he said.
Marketing is a big part of what book publishers do but they had been going in blind to some extent, Mr Ractliffe said. ''Because book publishers have mostly relied on retailers to sell their titles, we didn't have a lot of knowledge about who our readers were but now we can communicate directly with them and see exactly how many in each age group are reading our books via Facebook.''
Communication with its 64,000 Facebook fans had driven many of the author's fans into a shop to buy Passion, the latest book in the series, which told a story of fallen angels and forbidden love, he said.
Social media were a key plank in the strategy for the launch, but Random House Australia also used an iPhone app and a trailer posted on YouTube and screened in cinemas.
''There is no doubt that the publishing industry is in a state of transition and you can choose to be scared or excited by that,'' Mr Ractliffe said. ''I choose to be excited.''
Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/business/social-media-the-new-key-tool-in-selling-books-20110714-1hg0b.html#ixzz1SB5e8CG
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